1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a biomolecule-based electronic device.
2. Background of Technique
Since 1989, various principles of molecular electronics have been proposed as promising information storage concepts to overcome the physical and technical limits of conventional silicon-based memory concepts such as the regional charge trap and transfer (1-12). J. J. Hopfield et al. proposed an information storage device with a shift register memory concept. This concept utilized two main energy sources, the photon and the electron, in order to obtain simple switch-type memory characteristics (8). M. C. Hersam et al. showed that the electrical properties of a single molecule can be measured by high vacuum scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) in order to prove that a single molecule can be applied to silicon-based molecular electronic devices (9). D. F. Bocian et al. investigated the redox kinetics of the porphyrin-based molecule attached to the surface of Si (100) to demonstrate the hybrid molecular/semiconductor information storage device (10-13). The molecular information storage system can be directly incorporated to organic/bio-mimicking systems, as well as to bio-architectures such as neurosystems, if a memory element consists of a biomaterial. T. Aoki et al. recently proposed an information storage logic that was composed of DNA or enzymes (14). The possibility of encoding information in the base sequences of DNA was shown by the manipulation of DNA with enzymes or DNAzymes (15). The present inventors also investigated the shift register memory effects using the biomolecular hetero Langmuir Blodgett (LB) layer to achieve simple electronic functions of the molecular diode and switching device with photocurrent generation and a rectifying property (16, 17). However, the characteristics of memory device, including the “Read”, “Write”, and “Erase” functions, have not yet been demonstrated using well-defined proteins to sustain simple and stable information signals.
Throughout this application, various publications and patents are referred and citations are provided in parentheses. The disclosures of these publications and patents in their entities are hereby incorporated by references into this application in order to fully describe this invention and the state of the art to which this invention pertains.